Dichotomy
by Splinter Cell
Summary: Ginny isn't quite the same person she used to be... This is - hopefully - just the beginning of a longer Ginny story where I really get into her mind. This is a Prologue of sorts. Also, it doesn't merit the PG13 label but I messed up rating it. All review


Dichotomy

****

Disclaimer: Nothing is mine except my version of Ginny

Genre: Angst

Rating: PG 13 though I doubt it warrants it

Summary: Ginny's not the same person she used to be…

Why this ficlet exists: I was reading a glut of Tom/Ginny fics and for the first time ever, Ginny struck me as an interesting character that had possibilities. With any luck, I might continue this… 

Feedback: Always; either at ff.net or to: allana_linn_vegas@hotmail.com

Thank you to: all those wonderful Tom/Ginny writers whose writing was such a pleasure to read and to Jo for suggestions, punctuation and still encouraging me to continue this – you rock!

Ginny thinks she shouldn't know what dichotomy means. Hell, she doesn't think she should know that such a word even exists. She is almost positive that it shouldn't be one of the first words that comes to mind when she tries to describe herself. But it did, and Professor Trelawney gave her an odd, odd look when she read what Ginny had written. 

_Dichotomy _

_Weasley _

_Hidden_

_Loving_

The list went on and on, for the most full of positive adjectives which Ginny had added not because she felt that they fitted her but because she had to break up the worryingly negative words. And right at the bottom there's a big blob of ink where she wrote a word and then scribbled it out because really, it's not the sort of thing Trelawney should be seeing.

_Perverted. _

Ginny knows full and well how she appears to other people – the good girl, the nice girl, the pining-after-the-saviour-of-the-world girl. More recently, this last summer holiday even, she realised that she created this persona because although she knew the truth, she didn't, no, couldn't accept it… until now. Now she feels like a square peg in a circular hole and knows she can no longer play the part she wrote for herself.

The truth. What is the truth? That there are only two types of people in the world or none? That we are all either black or white or that we can never be either? Good, Bad, or just plain Ugly? 

It's bollocks she thinks. There are three types of people. 

White - these are the Good people. The cowboys who wear white hats and always win the gunfights. These are Harry Potter and her own brother Ron and Hermione and Dumbledore and the rest of the Order. They suppress their darker impulses because _it's the right thing to do. _

Black – and then these would be the Bad people. The black-hatted hell-raisers, the jackbooted soldiers, the cold, the calculating, the merciless, ruthless, heartless. These are the Dark Lords and the Death Eaters, the traitors and the spies. These are the people who give in to their darker impulses _because they want to_.

And finally, the Grey, a group to which Ginny claims membership. They loiter in the shadows on the edge of morality; they'll scorn the Light and flirt with the Dark but truly belong to neither. These are the people who when they see knives being drawn in a fight, make wagers on who will inflict the most damage. They aren't stainless and they certainly won't ever be sanctified but they're not truly evil. 

Whoever Ginny was before the events of her first year, whoever she may have _been_ is gone now, been ripped away, leaving her feeling strangely naked and showing her that everything that had gone before had just been a pretence. A 50 year-old memory preserved in a diary showed her more about herself than she thinks she'd ever have found out herself, even if someone were willing to give her a century or two. 

And it wasn't nice. As clichéd as the phrase is, the truth really does hurt. It stings and it burns and it rips you up inside until you feel as though you're just a bunch of raw nerves held together by flimsiest of silken threads. 

Ginny spent the entirety of the next three years running. Running from the knowledge, from the sympathetic and pitying looks the Trio gave her. Running and running and running with nowhere to go and no idea what to do. Ginny's always believed in the mantra 'When the going gets tough, the tough get going' but she realised too late that you can't out-run yourself. And when she caught up with herself…

Ginny opened the Chamber of Secrets. Ginny wrote those terrifying messages on the wall. All those students who were Petrified might as well have been Petrified by her own hand. Ginny very nearly brought the Dark Lord back to life, albeit a lot younger but that's _all right_ because Ginny was a vulnerable young girl who was taken advantage of and then controlled and who, at the end of the day, _did_ try to destroy the diary. 

…Ginny thought she'd already hit rock bottom, and then rock bottom hit her. 

She isn't stupid. Even Professor Snape has to admit, grudgingly and with copious amounts of snarling and spittle that she's bright, and talented and likely to go very far in her chosen field. She knew something wasn't right when the diary started talking to her; some primal instinct buried in the deep structures of her brain had perked up its ears and started howling… but Ginny ignored it. She kept on writing, not because she had to, or because Tom was actually forcing her to but out of her own free will. She wrote in it because she wanted to and because it -- and he -- was so very _wrong_. 

Of course she _was_ naïve and it _did_ get out of hand far quicker than she could have ever thought possible and she _did_ end up trying to destroy the damned thing but not for any of the reasons anyone thinks she did. She poured her soul into the diary and it poured right back. She gave, and received and what he gave her; his ideals, his reasoning, his attitudes, and they made sense to her in a way nothing else had. Her family view their Pureblood as a disgrace and a thing to be hidden but Ginny has always viewed it as a thing to take pride in. In the privacy of her own thoughts, she's always agreed with the Malfoys of the Wizarding world that Muggles are dangerous and that interacting with them, allying with them, is an act of virtual suicide. Of course, airing these views is an impossibility, but they are there, and she thinks them nonetheless. 

But what he showed her, or made her show herself rather, was too much for her to take and what happened after that, as they say, is history. 

Ginny desperately _wants_ to be the good little Gryffindor who's happy to hide in the shadow of Harry Potter, only thrust into the spotlight when he deigns to talk to her. She wants it, but the next moment she doesn't. She wants her crush on him to be the same as it was when she first met him, but at the same time, she's infinitely glad it's not. She desperately craves to go back to the simple, one-dimensional character she was before but when she thinks back to that time she cringes. She's a conflicting storm of emotions and thoughts and is in two minds about so much that it's a wonder she manages to get out of bed every morning. 

Ginny was running for three years, desperately trying to suppress the part of her that had been awoken by his memory; the Slytherin in her that she called Ginny Riddle. The part that admired the Slytherins, thought Ron's comebacks to Malfoy were rather lame, saw the Twins as being pathetic and despised Harry Potter for saving her life. Three years of looking in the mirror a thousand times a day to make sure that there had been no change in her face that would alert people to the fact that she'd changed _inside_. Three years of hating herself. Three years of dreaming about him every night and hearing his voice inside her head every day. Three years of looking up every article ever written about him and cutting out every photo. Three years of seeing him whenever she looked at Harry Potter. 

She nearly killed herself before she accepted everything. In fact, at the very moment the proverbial penny dropped, she had a broken bit of glass pressed against her wrist. It was one of those moments that she'd read about countless times but had always thought were merely fiction. The world slowed down and everything became crystal clear. The angles in her room were sharper somehow, the colours were richer and the silence was suddenly alive with a thousand tiny noises. She looked up slowly and met her reflection's impassive gaze and in that one moment of painful clarity, she saw the neurotic mess she'd become and the piece of glass didn't make a sound as it slipped out of her fingers and dropped onto the floor. 

She stopped pretending after that, stopped trying to fit other peoples' perceptions and if there was a noticeable difference to her, no-one commented on it, which didn't surprise her half as much as it maybe should have. 

So now she drifts through school, doing the work and doing it well but without any motivation. She goes to the lessons and says nothing at all and makes no effort to talk to people because she knows they won't understand. She still dreams of him at night but now they help get her through the coming day. She dreads the holidays because not all of her family are as blind as Ron or the Twins. She deflects talk of the future because although she knows she wants to make an impact on the world and for her name to be known, she has no idea how to go about it. She still has a crush on Harry but now it's solely because he reminds her of Him. 

She's living contradiction; a living, breathing, thinking dichotomy. 

She's not of the Light but by no means Dark. 

She can never go back and be the girl she used to be.

She's praying the Death Eaters don't try to recruit her because at the moment, she's really not sure what her answer would be. 

Her name… is Virginia Emma Weasley. 


End file.
